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October 23, 2005
Domestic Politics and the War in Iraq
One of the questions I have always had about the war in Iraq was why the Clinton's seemed to favorite it (Hilary voted to support the war) or at best stand aside. Scott Ritter, the chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq between 1991 and 1998 (you know the guy who was right about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) has an idea that is worth considering. It's all about domestic politics not about what was the correct action with regard to Iraq.
Here is a snippet of what Ritter told Democracy Now in a recent interview.
I'm not somebody who’s into conspiracy theories, and I'm not somebody who’s out there saying this is about global oil. The tragedy of Iraq is that it’s about domestic American politics. This is a president, George Herbert Walker Bush, who in 1990, traps himself rhetorically by linking Saddam Hussein to Adolph Hitler. Once you do that, once you speak of a Nuremburg-like retribution, you can't negotiate your way out of that problem. Now it's either deliver Saddam Hussein's head on a platter or you failed. He tried to during the Gulf War. I was part of a team that was targeting Saddam. We didn't succeed.Now the C.I.A. says, “Don't worry, Saddam will be gone in six months. All you have to do is contain him, put these sanctions in place and keep him bottled up and he'll collapse.” Six months later Saddam Hussein is still there. His continued survival became a political embarrassment that had to be dealt with.
This was inherited by Bill Clinton. The irony is that Bill Clinton – and I'm very critical of Bill Clinton, but you know, in the period between his election in 1992 and his being sworn in, his administration reached out to the Iraqis in saying, “Look, this is a ridiculous policy, let's figure out how we can get sanctions lifted and get you back into the family of nations.” But when politicians in Congress, both Democrat and Republican, found out about this, they said, “You can't do this. We have told our constituents this man is Hitler, and we can't negotiate with the devil.”
We were trapped by this policy. And this cabal we speak of, the neoconservatives, they may not have originated this policy but they exploited eight years of Clinton administration's ineffective policy of dealing with Saddam. Saddam's survival for eight years empowered the neoconservatives to use regime change as a rallying cry for the Republican Party.
I hope this explanation is wrong but I worry that it is, as the British say, spot on. Name-calling has consequences, some times deadly consequences. Among the problems we face in this country is that the electorate is more likely to punish political courage than it is to rewarded it. Sometimes it is necessary to call rhetoric of the moment, "rhetoric of the moment" and move on. But that takes political courage.
This interview was granted Democracy Now as part of the process of publicizing Scott Ritter's new book, Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein. I haven't read it yet but it is definitely on my to do list.
Posted by Duane Smith at October 23, 2005 12:03 PM | Read more on Current Events |
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Comments
Unfortunately, it sounds spot on to me. The fact that we never progressed beyond the sanctions also had a role to play.
Posted by: afarensis at October 23, 2005 5:37 PM
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